Time, Love and Tenderness

Reception

The massive commercial success of Time, Love & Tenderness is sharply contrasted with its critical reception, marked by mostly negative reviews.

In one of the album's few positive reviews, AllMusic criticized the album as a clone of its predecessor, Soul Provider, particularly deriding the cover of "When a Man Loves a Woman" as the album's "obligatory R&B carbon copy". However, they praised the songwriting of Diane Warren, as well as Bolton's singing and his songwriting on the track "Steel Bars".

The Chicago Tribune gave it one of its few mixed reviews, saying that Bolton's talent as a vocalist is generally outweighed by the mediocre material, but that "When a Man Loves a Woman", "We're Not Makin' Love Anymore", "Missing You Now", and "Love Is a Wonderful Thing" are all strong moments. Los Angeles Times also gave a mixed review, calling the album "commercial" and "glitzy", but praising it as containing Bolton's strongest material to date.

However, Entertainment Weekly thoroughly panned the album, declaring that "Bolton's singing amounts to gimmicks ... that replicate soul mannerisms without a hint of that music's power for re-creating human feeling." They derided the album's R&B covers as lacking sensitivity and the original cuts as being formulaic.

The Rolling Stone Album Guide was also mostly negative, criticizing Bolton's vocals on the album for the same reasons as Entertainment Weekly did.

In his Consumer Guide, Robert Christgau gave the album a "dud" rating, calling it "a bad record whose details rarely merit further thought."

Credits

Personnel

Controversy

In 1964, the American R&B group The Isley Brothers recorded a song titled "Love Is a Wonderful Thing". Not included on an Isley Brothers album until years later, the song was released as a single in 1966 on a 45rpm vinyl record, and it "bubbled under" on the Billboard chart, meaning that it peaked between #101 and #125 on the Hot 100. Bolton's song contained similarities to the song by the Isleys that exceeded the title: in 1994, a jury found songwriters Bolton and Goldmark, along with Sony Music Entertainment (the parent company of Bolton's label, Columbia Records), liable for copyright infringement due to multiple similarities between the two songs and ordered them to pay the Isleys all profits earned from the single plus 28% of the album profits, which amounted to over US$5 millions. On May 9, 2000, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, an appellate court covering the western regions of the U.S., affirmed the jury's decision, which is one of the largest monetary sums to be awarded in a case such as this. On January 22, 2001, the Supreme Court of the United States declined to review the decision of the appellate court despite Bolton's claims that he had never heard the Isley Brothers recording (although he was a fan of their music) and that he was exercising his right to "independent creation". The decision by the Supreme Court not to hear the case resulted in the original verdict remaining valid.